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Topics related to Application Performance Management, Cloud Technology, and SmartCloud Control Desk. Our goals are to describe, teach and relate, as well as provoke thought by approaching our topics from a variety of points of view.

5 considerations when moving to the cloud

While there is great appeal for moving to the cloud, you might want to be on
the lookout for some of the following considerations. While these are the top
ones, they do not constitute an exhaustive list.

1. Monitoring: can I see what I have and monitor it?

This is an essential part of assessing how your cloud environment is
performing.

Providing reports on how the services are performing, what the availability
of these services is and in return, how are the service levels affected would be
testament to the business value.

2. Security: moving outside my total control

This has certainly been of the most concern when it comes to hosting
applications and data in a cloud environment and comprehending the risks
involved can be challenging. While there are numerous technologies that would
address all facets of the security spectrum, the often-neglected part of the
equation is the process handling of the information that is now being entrusted
to someone else and how to enforce one’s company security policy. A typical
representation of this would be the fact that data residing in another country
might make this data accessible by the local jurisdiction. Another issue would
be how the hosting organization staff is handling and accessing the information
and what are the processes regulating access to the information.

3. Performance:, can I expect the same from the cloud?

Your users have been accustomed to the speedy applications performance when
the servers are only floors away, now that they are basically out of sight,
light years away in a remote data center, this might not be the case anymore and
performance issues might crop up.

One does need to grasp the implications of application performance in a cloud
environment and how this can meet the expected outcome in terms of response
time, latency, resiliency and scalability in a more complex environment and how
these can be measured and projected to determine the optimum hosting
scenario.

4. Vendor lock-in: the hostage situation

This is the dilemma facing every customer: What is the best solution out
there for me? While some vendors will be providing you with an open platform
that supports different types or hypervisors (VMware, KVM, Zvm) and a pledge to
supporting open standards, others will invariably be keen to enter into a vendor
“lock-in” solution where turning to an alternative solution can be painstaking.
Your choice is therefore between “all options are open” or “this is my only
choice for the foreseeable future.” While the last option might accommodate
your requirements at the time of your decision, you might also consider giving
yourself alternatives as it might prove a painstaking experience switching to
the alternative once you are engaged with the vendor.

5. Migration: moving applications to the cloud

Last but not least, while few contest the agility in porting one’s
applications to the cloud, not all are good candidates for migration. You might
check whether these applications are web supported, what type of database is
being used, whether it is itself supported and how easy it is to migrate these
applications back from the vendor’s infrastructure; the financial aspect of the
endeavor should also be looked at as it might be a costly option.

Maamar is part of the Worldwide Technical and Service Delivery team covering the
Cloud solutions portfolio, currently covering the Asia Pacific region. Maamar
has been with IBM for the last 15 years across different teams and project in
the Asia Pacific region. His area of expertise covers best practices such as
ITIL, Cobit and ISO20000 standard as well as well as a range of Cloud offerings.
He has co-authored three IBM Redbooks. Maamar is currently living in Singapore
and Hong Kong. You can follow him on Twitter at @MaAsiaPacific